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INC

Party details

The Indian National Congress (abbreviated INC, and commonly known as the Congress) is one of the two major political parties in India, the other being the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). It is the largest and one of the oldest democratically-operating political parties in the world. The party's modern liberal platform is largely considered to be on the centre-left of the Indian political spectrum in contrast to the right-wing Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party.

The Organisation was founded in 1885 by Allan Octavian Hume, Dadabhai Naoroji, Dinshaw Wacha, Womesh Chandra Bonnerjee, Surendranath Banerjee, Monomohun Ghose, Mahadev Govind Ranade and William Wedderburn. Hume was also a prominent member of the Theosophical Society. In the following decades, the Indian National Congress became a pivotal participant in the Indian Independence Movement, with over 15 million members and over 70 million participants in its struggle against British colonial rule in India. After independence in 1947, it became the nation's dominant political party; in the 15 general elections since independence, the Congress has won an outright majority on six occasions, and has led the ruling coalition a further four times, heading the central government for a total of 49 years. It has been led by the Nehru-Gandhi family for the most part, with major challenges for party leadership emerging only since 2010.